Laura Mullenis the author of eight books: Complicated
Grief is forthcoming from Solid Objects in 2014. Recognitions for her
poetry include Ironwood’s Stanford Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts
Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award. She has had several MacDowell Fellowships
and is a frequent visitor at the Summer Writing Program at the Jack Kerouac
School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. Her work has been widely anthologized
and is included in Postmodern American Poetry, and American Hybrid
(Norton), and I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les
Figues). Undersong, the composer Jason Eckardt’s setting of “The Distance (This)”
(from Subject) was released on Mode records in 2011. Mullen is the
McElveen Professor in English at LSU and a contributing editor for the on-line
poetry site The Volta.

The fragment as broken blade, as shrapnel, or something softer,
virus, pollen? It enters and goes on entering: it works its way in. Because it
halts it continues…

Working.

In the place where an absence abrupt calls attention to itself
(there’s something missing) there’s a sharpness, an edge we can’t help running a
thumb over and then pushing into the skin.

At the site of the _____________ the possibility of something
else there, marriage of what is and what could be: cyborg, hybrid thing, it’s
the excited site of the active join…something made by writer and reader (and in
this way all texts are fragments, fragmentary…).

The “readerly” text is made “writerly,” as starred—by Roland
Barthes—in S/Z. A starring or
scarring that makes of the text a collection of bits and pieces. Look up
“analysis.” Break it down for me.

Shattered by attention, mended by attention. And vice versa.

Anything, as Gertrude Stein noticed, is interesting if you read
it one word at a time.

The fragment is history’s gift, time’s present, the astonishing
evidence of care and carelessness—from Sappho’s poems down to the phonemes
found on the blotting paper in the library in a detective novel which become
the clue or key (absolving, betraying) and on to all our willful contemporary
erasures…

Isn’t the fragment “Antifragile” (Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s great
word)? It gains from disorder, from the chaos of possible interpretations, from
the force that eroded the original intention, from the creative power of the
questions we bring to the encounter with the incomplete. Time and hard use are
its friends and further destruction only opens further possibility… Maybe?

With each loss what’s left becomes more meaningful—up to a
certain point?

Insofar as the fragment gives birth to the archivist, detective
and scholar at once, it is the productive site of an ardent engagement
involving memory and imagination, selflessness and an exquisite delight.

My first experience of the fragment in all its mystery / mastery
was (I think) that one sentence chapter in a William Faulkner novel—(“My
mother…” I could not believe what I was reading, I knelt as I finished the
sentence “is a fish”)—my first experience in Art, that is.

In Life? Ah…

My most recent experience of the fragment is The Gorgeous Nothings, that transformative
collection of Emily Dickinson’s aphorisms, scraps, drafts, explorations: short
prayers still working their way inward in me, each with its pale wake of
spacious quiet, each stillness, each stop, awakening “that awful stranger,
consciousness.”

Murmur and Subject, the start of my love affair
with what passes out of reach (oh I’m lying: that “love” would have begun when
I was four, yes? With my parents’ divorce?): in Murmur the unfinished phrases make a constant enactment of the way
even those of us not stopped mid-sentence by violence rarely get to see
anything finished… But after beginning to think seriously about Stein, and then
after “the Federal Flood” (in which my notes on Stein dissolved) I wanted more
than ever to make openings (I think so, I think I think so, I think this is
what I remember): writing

instead
of

des

closer

not even now knowing the

letter
by

let

And then there was Zong!

It takes so much courage to stay at the site of the phoneme
where the wronged begin to talk back to communicate in what wat

Fragment: I fall upon that

Fragment: rough splinters of smoke caught my

Fragment: half here or half gone, denial and suggestion

Fragment: souvenir site of some trouble to remember

Fragment: half silence

Fragment: at the end at the beginning

Fragment: at once ancient and young

And then, then…life. All this thinking and the giddiness of
speech or rather writing and then recalling the face of the young woman who
confessed she’d been molested, felt “sick,” about it didn’t know how to speak…
Haunts me. The fragmented lives. The places where, torn open, silence
intervenes, where shame shuts down the rest of the…the…

“I hate eloquence,” Helene Cixous said, in another language, a
translated phrase that stays with me. The smooth power to assert put only to
the exploration of safe topics.

Fragment: I stilled under the unwanted caress and stayed there

Fragment: sickened

Fragment: then it seemed

Fragment: this thing I wasn’t to speak of wasn’t sure had to no
words for ashamed

Fragment: that it was not chosen is

Where the promising beginning was

by greed by lust twisted
power cruel and

. Or further, at the grave of the

or suicide.

Life itself as something we struggle to understand from the
shards left to us, left in us…

Where we don’t even get to dream
in the sentence, or where that notion of where we might have been able to go is
only a ghost, lost phantom clause that could have, you have to believe me, would
have, if only

Fragment: where was it you first learned to think of it like
that?

Fragment: in celebration and mourning

Here is the hole, the holy broken edge of heaven, all we’ve been
left, all we will leave.

Circuits by Jennifer K Dick, Corrupt Press 2013

240pp on translation in the wide range of the social sciences today. Available for order and reviewing (click image) from the Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, Paris. The articles collected here originated in a conference held in Paris at the EHESS in summer 2009.

IVY WRITERS PARIS bilingual reading series founded by JK Dick and M Noteboom

TRANSMISIBILITY AND CULTURAL TRANSFER: DIMENSIONS OF TRANSLATION IN THE HUMANITIES, click to order

Click 4 Tears in the Fence Magazine, UK. I write a reg column in each issue for them!

“The only literary magazine in the UK that lets the margins and the great tradition speak. It is a book to treasure.”-- Ketaki Kushari Dyson on issue 57. ISSUE N° 59 will be out in April 2014, order now!

Click image for NEW SITE, FEB 2014. FYI: Versal has been called “edgy” “urgent” and “evocative” (--Robyn Campbell) It is “a thoughtful collection of sophisticated, inventive writing and art.”—Cara Bigony, New Pages. Order by clicking image